Open New Windows Preference?
 

OK, I thought I understood this ...

I have General Preferences set to Open New Windows: With a perspective (Priority). I keep OF running and click on the active Dock icon to bring forward a window. My thought is, the above setting would force the new window to default to my Priority perspective. However, this happens sometimes, and sometimes it does not. In those cases where a different perspective shows than Priority, it seems to be the perspective window that I viewed just previously and then closed (before moving on to other applications).

I have trashed my OF preferences once and rebuilt the database as a test. The behavior is unaffected.

Am I misunderstanding the purpose of the Open New Windows setting, or is this perhaps a bug?

Mac OS X 10.6.x (latest)

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JJW

It looks a bit broken to me (not the only thing broken about new window creation, IMO).

Clicking on the dock icon with no windows open always creates a copy of the last window I had open, ignoring the preference setting. On the other hand, the New Window command obeys the preference setting for using last window settings or perspective, as it should.

Clicking on the dock icon won't create a new window if you've got no document windows open, but do have a Preferences window open. That also seems like a borderline bug to me. If clicking on the dock icon when you have no document windows open creates one, why shouldn't it create one in another case where you have no document windows open? My apologies if you hadn't previously noticed this behavior, and now it is bugging you :-)

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;109873]....Clicking on the dock icon won't create a new window if you've got no document windows open, but do have a Preferences window open. That also seems like a borderline bug to me. If clicking on the dock icon when you have no document windows open creates one, why shouldn't it create one in another case where you have no document windows open? My apologies if you hadn't previously noticed this behavior, and now it is bugging you :-)[/QUOTE]

I recall somewhere hearing that standard MacOS behavior is that clicking a dock icon is supposed to be handled as a signal to open SOMETHING related to the app. An open Preference window fulfills the "something" category by default.

Since I rarely keep preferences open, this is no bother.

As a positive note ... I do find that using a control-click action on the dock icon to open a specific perspective often goes faster than just clicking on the dock icon (and awaiting the result).

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JJW

Yep, it appears that the right thing happens when you summon a new window via the keyboard or a menu, but clicking the dock icon doesn't respect that preference. Filing bug. Thanks!